Edit: Meme has been slightly altered to be more accurate. Credit to @ininewcrow for the updated and better image.
Wouldn’t work. Doesn’t feel the same. Half of the country or more personally identifies as red neck, and proudly. If someone called me that, my first impulse would be a joking fist pump because one half of my family is that, yes.
Those that don’t self-identify either jokingly or in seriousness wouldn’t see the shirt as applying to themselves, so no part of it would land at all. They’d just giggle and agree like most people in this thread are doing.
Notwithstanding that the actual term redneck came about from the red handkerchiefs worn by workers during the Battle of Blair Mountain, an ongoing strike between unionized coal miners and local company towns that ended in anywhere from an estimated 20 - 100 dead. So again, fuck yeah my ass is a redneck.
Paleface.
Paleface does not have and has never had a good connotation. That one is different and nothing about the implicit reminder is fun. It’s one of two whole terms in existence that would make me knee-jerk upset. I’m hoping against every experience I’ve had with a fairly disappointing race that nobody proudly refers to themselves in the open as Paleface.
Go with that one.
It’s one of two whole terms in existence that would make me knee-jerk upset.
What’s the other term?
I was sitting there after posting that, thinking to myself that this was definitely something someone would immediately ask me in person, so to see it pop up instantly in my notifications like that was both very funny and a depressing statement on human nature. “You mentioned there are two surefire ways to make you really sad for the rest of the day, but you only gave us one?”
I considered not answering, because that would be amazingly stupid ammo to just give away for free, but the thing about me is I wouldn’t be alive right now if I weren’t also amazingly stupid.
Anyway, one half of my family are wannabe rednecks. The other side is turkish and the only people in America who can find that on a map are the only ones who know exactly what they’re talking about. For reasons that are pretty understandable, there is enmity between turks and greeks, armenians, etc., so on the few occasions I’ve intentionally or accidentally outed the connection about myself in such company, I’ve more than once been called roach to my face with zero other provocation.
In their defense, ✩°｡⋆we do a little genocide as a treat⋆｡°✩, and seeing people double and triple down instead of simply just admitting that was maybe a mistake seems despairingly common. (If this is you, anonymous reader, you’re not having the effect on your national image that you think you are, and I wish I could go one day without being humiliated by proxy).
In my defense, the first person to ever say this to me was in their late 60s, I was a teenager, and I have never even been out of the country before. My numbers may be off because I got that public school education, but I do not think I was alive back then to have had any hand in this. In that sense, another (otherwise dismissive) commenter was very on the nose when they compared the dynamic at play to Original Sin: I never did this. I do not and would never agree to this. I can do very close to nothing or actually nothing at all to ever begin to fix it. But I still have to spend my life repenting for it.